Poetry

Parramore Island for Tom Horton Under a shoal of stars, the Atlantic surf murmurs like ghosts on the sandy coasts of the barrier islands east of Wachapreague and Quinby. Parramore Island sails the troubled eons of nautical history like a ghostly schooner of the mind, appearing, disappearing …at the edge of the world, Tom Horton says. Edges abound, everywhere with life, with fecund migrations of fish and fowl. One finds the deep-down natural scurrying of briar and shell at the edges of seasons, at junctures of forest and field where startles the owl and the white tailed deer, in the deep periwinkled and oystered mud where the salt march and sea converge, in the exhalations of the booming deep-sea drum. What fish may swim on the edge of sleep and wakefulness? My son, my son, Where have you gone in the wide world? The Atlantic surf murmurs of hole and bar and reef, as Tom Horton says, in a subsonic voice heard by gulls on the Barbary Coast of Africa. Edges live everywhere in the latticework of the mind. The gulls hear each murmur of the moon-drenched surf of every salt creek and curve of Parramore Island as shadowed vibrations in bone and skull. Age-old migratory paths rush from Africa to the Chesapeake Bay, as Tom Horton says. It’s an awful world to wander in when you are young and have lost your bearings. In the hush of ambient twilight at Parramore amber foxes detach themselves from the dunes’ shadows, finding in their earthy haunt the secret edge of poetry. . . . Lighthouse Lighthouse from the mist with the sun in its tower-- Soft poem, above the rocks. Oh, greater than the shallows Freighters hauling ore, packet boats, trawlers If I were to love you it would be with no reservations Night spills of the sea, white nurses in moonlight Breaking, O breaking, steep in their caps, rising Flotsam from the sea, dream riding dream, hail! Fine waters, deft shadows, evening-- bring you to me . . .

Occohannack Road It is easy to get used to the smell of horses and urine-soaked hay With the Chesapeake behind it…dung in the stables Stars in the pasture….leather and spring rain Your whole body slips into the confluence Of hoof and sail, withers tremble Easy Clifford plods paths of sojas and boysenberry Trail dust settles softly on the waters of the brain . . .

The Murdered Girl Murdered girl, curled, in frost Naked to the rumpled air Moonlight slips through expiring leaves Finding strings of shadow Never have you lain alone In your grove of Shot Bush Speckled Adler Shadows plunge in excitation To the primal gut, racketing Leaves from Trees of Heaven. Never has there been Human hurt not shared By raving man In communal blood Worms oscillate, descend Within the shadows’ curse To drill time’s crust. Church bells chime their Random notes. Dimensions Unearth and Black Elders, shaken Drop flowered Rain Light bends around your weight And all things declare their eternal fall Through shelves of space …to where you are Forever and ever We are all murdered: all . . . Odysseus In a winged conviction Black rictus of wind and spiraling eye The curled sail is torn from its clew I know the manhood of this weather The spinning mirrors So much for Ithaca, New York The bloom is off the myths Of rose. The fall is due. I cannot swim I am sixty one in February Who shall string my bow? In my tired room, I think To drudge from bed to computer screen My kidneys bleed and the gods play drums The shells! The mud! My paper gulls! In acid rain slumps the albatross I have dined on Penelope Telemachus, son! Look toward home! Spied through the fat end of an extended glass The dolphin devolves beyond the carnal stone Beginning or ending, the music’s done I preach in college, having Won my fame in the bowels of a horse What stygian suds floods this shingle Where I’ve landed? Achilles warned me Hector’s curses hang like laundry Ajax’s suicide is oddly duh rigueur Pound’s old bitch, gone at the tooth Is mad with grinning. Epically speaking My children mock me moan for moan I take a small step, as if to cross my room Circe plays to ears of wax In the shadows, the moon finds me Uninteresting, naked and alone, Prufrockian. No proof of disc nor dat A pale expanse of ghastly illumined skin Fly Hades’ bireme, Myrmidon Of my soul, to storm the citadel of poetry My feet, at least, are on the floor. I’m standing. The stars descend, dropping As snow on an isthmus mooring Nobody remembers Homer’s children I tell myself. I’m a horrible father, Vilified, no less, by those I haven’t left What long ship bears an old man’s shields-- Blindness? Frailty? Love of sleeping? Drifts of meaning? What nexus? Meaning drifts, as in—before my eyes Even as a child, I sensed overwhelming Complexity, pantoums…was more or less Certain God didn’t know everything… Thought Moses a fool after the bloody Foreskin brawl and rescue by Zappora. Achtung, Jehovah! So grew I, No One, a blister A boil, a stake in the eye, filled with loose taunts In a shaky boat on the eventide The bottoms of my pajamas rolled Trickster, I, begin a shuffle across my room Where poetry thrives in counterfeit Verse that must be completed, then rehearsed, Then spoken aloud before the mass(es)… My people died in storms at sea Of rocks, stones, smoke, fits, and slaughter But I’ll sail, praise Woe, lachrymose, but better fed On honey dew, to scops’ fjord On ashen knarr by way of prelude to my hollow Not Valhalla! Alas, Ted Hughes If crow could see me now, taking a pass On the mystic synergy of the universe My hair not black, nor set in root by blood But languid, sprawled, about my head In crystalline cacophony. Don’t I hate This foolish sundog, now I cry! Thumbing concave back waves like a jinn In the morning I break up, mend all the afternoon Aw, these ugly boomers, hurdling by Coins from my eyes will pay the boatman On the other side. My computer weeps At news I’m coming. I’ll stop at nothing Mix my metaphors, jamb my ends Leap caesuras pause amend Savant, at sea, at last, neglecting daughters I’ll cross this water, put pen to paper Metaphorically, in other words Employ said computer to end all wars Crying out, I am Odysseus Poet of all men finned and born To swim in thrall ad infinitum And never make it home in a timely fashion Here, then, is my apologia. I’ve been old For more than twenty centuries I’m rotten wood, crumbled stone, and Forgotten ash, blown to must and gory Verse by verse, in obtuse tomes of ancient poetry All singing’s holy. Dreams of the rood Engorge the channels of my blood It’s no fault of mind that I’m not dead Blame the furies. Overrated jerks Who’ve lost real interest in their work Whither have the sisters gone? All night long blows Cape Sable’s horn I wonder why. I wonder why